By SirWatts on November 23rd, 2007 (more posts by author)

I'm just on such a cold streak in tournaments right now though. The live final table at Foxwoods was great but busting 7th really sucked and other than that I've just had no final tables lately. I've busted with two tables left so many times it's pretty frustrating. Anyways I made the money in the big FTOPS $2500 event just grinding on a short stack the entire tournament, then sucked out to double up and then got it in with 99 vs 88 and held to get an above average stack for the first time in the tournament. From there I got outflopped in basically every pot I played and probably paid off more than I had to. I then busted out on this attempted hero call against a guy who kept calling my raises with weak hands and flopping gin on me.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1717346

The call was maybe bad because he likely thought I was a huge call station at this point and was therefore less likely to try to bluff me, but there's so many busted draws out there and I played the hand passively so it's quite possible I can have the best hand, especially as I doubt he makes this bet with anything except trips or better, or a complete bluff. I made a thread on 2+2 about the hand and a lot of good players said they like the call, though one guy who said he played with the opponent earlier in the tournament didn't think he was likely to run a big bluff like this, but of course I couldn't know that at the time from what I'd seen anyways. So it was a pretty crappy way to go from finally getting chips for the first time after 8 hours of play over 2 days to immediately donking them all off and busting for only $6k (first was over $400K) in 32nd or something.

I had no cashes in anything else on Sunday, and not on Saturday either iirc, so it was still a pretty bad weekend. Cash games had been going well all week until I lost $20K playing 200/400 PLO Sunday night. It's a lot of money but in relation to the stakes it's nothing to even write about really. Still up to $20K on the week at that, and also had good success in my 10/20 and 25/50 NL games though I didn't play a ton of hands, so overall I guess it was a pretty good week, just a sour end.

I'm in Toronto for another week and a half and then I'm heading down to Vegas for a bunch of tournaments. First is the National Poker League Vegas Open at the Venetian. I had never heard of it either but there's a $5K event and a $15K event that I'm going to play. I like the poker room at the Venetian a lot from the one tournament I played there over the summer. These will likely have smaller fields, which usually means tougher fields and not such huge top prizes, but it also decreases the variance a lot which isn't bad when playing such big buy-ins. After that I will be playing a ton of the Bellagio Cup events culminating in the $15K Championship event. Then I leave Vegas, fly back to Toronto for a couple days, and then head home to St. John's for Christmas. I'm back in Toronto for New Years and then off to Melbourne, Australia on Jan 2 for the Aussie Millions where I will be for just over 2 weeks playing most of the events in that series as well. I'll probably take a nice break from travel for a month or 2 after that, but who knows.

Mike